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The Terrorists' Zealotry is Political Not Religious

This commentary ran in the Washington Post on
Sunday, September 30, 2001.

The men who perpetrated the carnage on Sept. 11 left a trail of
clues about how they accomplished their mission, but virtually
nothing about why. They left behind no suicide notes explaining
what motivated them to kill thousands and die in the process, only
the vaguest exhortations to be steadfast in the quest of paradise.
But if they were indeed inspired by Osama bin Laden and his
supporters, as the Bush administration promises to demonstrate,
then they probably died for no more than an idea, the idea of
jihad.

This term invokes for many in the West the notion of a holy war
conducted by zealots in the name of their God with the aim of
imposing their beliefs on recalcitrant unbelievers. Since Sept. 11,
we have heard this idea repeated by public officials. In his
address to Congress, President Bush described the goal of al Qaeda
as "remaking the world and imposing its radical beliefs on people
everywhere."

Yet it would be a mistake to view the attacks on the Pentagon
and the World Trade Center as the latest phase of an Islamic holy
war to convert or subjugate unbelievers. Based on the most
illuminating of the few available statements of its mission, al
Qaeda's goals appear to be far more mundane than religious, more
political than theological. What's more, the organization's tactics
bore all the characteristics of a guerrilla attack, in which the
infiltrators blended into the society they were attempting to
terrorize, including, we are told, some of them spending one of
their last nights drinking in a bar -- hardly what could be
expected of holy warriors.

The stated grievances of the bin Laden network fit a pattern
familiar to students of Islamic activism over the past two
centuries. In a fatwa released in February 1998 (and echoed last
week by the Taliban), bin Laden and leaders of extremist groups in
Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh specified that their war was a
defensive struggle against Americans and their allies who had
declared war "on God, his messenger, and Muslims." The "crimes and
sins" perpetrated by the United States were threefold. First, it
had "stormed" the Arabian peninsula during the Gulf War and
continued "occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places"
(i.e., Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia); second, it continued a
war of annihilation against Iraq; and third, it supported the state
of Israel and its continued occupation of Jerusalem.

The only appropriate Muslim response, according to the
statement, was a defensive jihad to repulse the aggressor.
According to virtually all classical and modern scholars, such a
war -- unlike the expansionist jihad -- is a moral obligation
incumbent upon all true Muslims.

This list of grievances is certainly not unique to bin Laden's
group. The general complaint that the West is attacking Muslim
countries has been heard repeatedly before, as has the goal of
fighting the aggressors to compel their "armies to move out of all
the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim."
The notion of jihad involved here is not the one formed during the
period of Arab expansion in the 7th century or the Ottoman Turkish
expansion of the 15th and 16th centuries, but the one formed over
the past two centuries as Muslims struggled to respond to the
expansion of the West. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the
aggressor nations would have been the British, the French, the
Russians. Since the end of World War II, the United States has
increasingly occupied this position, and all the more so after it
became the guardian of the Persian Gulf during the late 1980s and
'90s.

The fact that American support of Israel comes third on the list
should not diminish its importance, as defenders of Israel have
assiduously claimed in the past two weeks. The widespread
perceptions that the United States provides carte blanche support
to Israel even as the Jewish state occupies Jerusalem and large
tracts of the West Bank and Gaza, that American-made weapons are
used to kill Palestinians opposing the occupation -- all while the
sanctions against Iraq remain in place 10 years after the Gulf War
-- spark the rawest emotional responses. These complaints require
no elaboration in the fatwa; they are immediately understood by the
statement's intended Muslim audience.

If we accept the fatwa as articulating the ideas that drive bin
Laden and his supporters, then there is nothing at all remarkable
about his group. They selectively quote from the Koran to establish
the basis for their jihad, but their motivations appear to spring
primarily from the same sort of anti-imperialism that motivates
religious and non-religious groups in the Middle East and other
parts of the world. They may view themselves as the vanguard of an
ideological movement that will ultimately overturn the societies of
the rich and powerful West, but their words and actions indicate
they are astute enough to realize this is a remote possibility.

Although they sometimes appear to be fired by the religious zeal
of the puritanical Wahhabi movements that twice swept Arabia, their
targets to date have not been offending religious or cultural
institutions, but political, military and economic targets:
American embassies in Africa, military barracks in Saudi Arabia,
the USS Cole, the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Moreover,
the long-term planning and coordination required for the Sept. 11
attacks demonstrate that al Qaeda is a far cry from Hamas and
Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian territories. Whereas the
Palestinian suicide bombers are recruited from mosques or the
street just days or hours before they die, the attacks in the
United States required several years of advance planning.

Most people, including many Arabs and Muslims, probably consider
bin Laden's avowed goal of driving the United States out of the
Middle East to be impractical and even imprudent. Still, many
people of good faith, Muslims and non-Muslims, Americans and
non-Americans, may share the general concerns with U.S. policies in
the region that al Qaeda has outlined as the basis for its
jihad.

It is when we cross from motivations to methods that people of
good faith -- and especially Muslims -- must unequivocally part
company with the extremists. We cannot allow them to say, in
pursuing their idea, that everything is permissible. The thrust of
the entire jihad tradition to which they appeal makes it clear that
everything is not permissible.

No principle is more clearly outlined in the Koran than this,
that even in the midst of battle -- a realm of human activity where
moral constraints are often loosened -- constraints must be
maintained. In one of the first verses outlining a military aspect
to jihad, the injunction is clear: "Fight in the cause of God those
who fight you, but do not transgress limits, for God loves not the
transgressor" (2:190). Commenting on this verse, the prominent
Syrian scholar Wahba Zuhayli writes: "Do not fight anyone unless
they fight you. Fighting is thus justified if you fight the enemy
and the enemy fights you. It is not justified against anyone who
does not fight the Muslims, and it is necessary [in this event] to
make peace." Zuhayli clearly rules out the possibility of
collective responsibility -- that all citizens belonging to a
perceived foe are somehow responsible.

The presumption of Islamic teachings on right conduct in war is
that individuals are innocent and therefore not subject to harm
unless they demonstrate by their actions that they are a threat to
the safety of Muslims. On this basis, the overwhelming majority of
Muslim scholars have for centuries rejected indiscriminate killing
and the terrorizing of civilian populations as a legitimate form of
jihad.

Osama bin Laden and his supporters give a brutally simple
response to the weight of the jihad tradition: "We do not
differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and
civilians," he has said. Because "U.S. aggression is affecting
Muslim civilians, not just the military," all Americans "are
targets in this fatwa."

In the name of retaliation, they claim, there are no
innocents.

This logic must also be rejected. It leads us into the infernal
and morally vacuous exercise of assigning blame -- a process of
tit-for-tat that leads, ad infinitum, into the past and holds the
potential for disastrous consequences in the future if the spiral
is unbroken.